A short story in which a game-changing technique has the ability to harness a power so potent it can bring seemingly impossible dreams to life…
by: Phoebe Danaher
The day we drove to Grosse Pointe, I had my first hangover in ten years. Strange, to have the full-body nausea I remembered from my early twenties while moving with my husband and children to the kind of affluent suburb that would have horrified my younger self. Ben drove, the kids were crushed in the back between suitcases, and I sweated out vodka. The moving truck was following us from Chicago. I would direct the movers while Ben hit the ground at his new company.
The job was an offer you don’t get every day, the kind that makes moving easier because why not get rid of the furniture that you bought in grad school? We could finally shop at Restoration Hardware. Ben quickly sold his car and began poring over Consumer Reports, deciding between an Escalade, an Expedition, or the G-Wagon. You had to keep up with these things in Grosse Pointe.
We arrived mid-August. Enough time for Ben to start work, barely enough time to get the kids ready for the new school year, and definitely not enough time for me to unpack. Word must have gotten out in our gated community, because one Saturday I answered the door and three women stood on my stoop.
“We’re from the HOA,” one said. “We’re here to help you unpack.”
The mention of the HOA chilled me to the bone, but they assured me they weren’t here to fine us for the bikes on the front porch. They wanted to help me unpack, and rather than continue drowning in cardboard boxes, I let them.
Within two hours, we’d made more progress than I had in weeks. Lisa, the head of the neurology team at Corewell Beaumont, delegated tasks easily. Janet was the lead soprano at the Detroit Opera House. She did the kitchen, and even though I had to reorganize the room the way I really wanted it, I loved her for tackling those pots and pans and getting the ice maker working. Sophia was a therapist, and she said there was nothing in our bedroom that could possibly shock her, so I let her handle that disaster.
By the end of the first day, my house finally looked like a home. I insisted the women stay for dinner — I would order take out — but they had to get home to their own families. Ben brought the kids back from the lake (they’d spent the afternoon on a colleague’s boat, no doubt in preparation for buying his own) and everyone marveled at the transformation. The books were alphabetized and everything.
M y new friends absorbed me into their lives. We’d have coffee at Lisa’s, play pickleball at Janet’s club, go to a rooftop bar owned by Sophia’s cousin. They made so much time for each other, even with such busy schedules. Lisa’s husband ran an accounting firm, and between February and April she barely saw him. Janet’s husband was at Ford, and Sophia’s was at Chrysler. They all had children between five and fifteen. Yet, these women had their lives together. Really together. Lisa’s name was always in some medical journal. Janet went on tour to Italy every year. Sophia had washboard abs for God’s sake.
And me? Between my job in publishing that I was now working remote, keeping Ben fed and watered for the brief hours he was home, and the kids (I suspected that Jason was allergic to feathers, something you don’t want to hear when you’ve just bought a $5000 down-cushioned couch), I sometimes had to choose between brushing my hair or my teeth.
“How do you all do it?” I asked my friends one day. “You all seem so balanced.”
“The important thing is, we get help at home,” Janet said, gesturing to her husband loading the dishwasher. When had Ben last cleared the sink? Sometime back in Chicago. Of course, he was lucky to come home before eight, but still…
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate Ben.”
“Of course,” the others said.
“But once he’s home, he’s too exhausted to help out. His work is high-stress.”
“But so is yours!” Janet said. “Not to mention your sons.”
“And we have a lady come in once a week to clean, but it’s those everyday tasks, you know? Everything seems to fall to me.”
“You need to make him understand the importance of an equitable partnership,” Sophia said. “It’s the twenty-first century.”
“He believes in equity. He’s read bell hooks. It’s just about applying those beliefs, you know?”
The women shared a knowing look. There was that odd pause the moment before someone tells you a secret.
“We’ve developed a technique,” Lisa said. “Combining our three fields.”
“And we don’t share it with just anyone,” Sophia added.
“But we like you,” Janet winked at me. “And we hope we can trust you.”
I waited. Were they about to ask me to swing? “What is it?” I finally said.
Janet nodded at Lisa. “Why don’t you show her? You’re the best at it.”
“On Travis? You don’t mind?”
“Be my guest,” Janet said. “Travis, honey, would you come in here for a sec?”
“Be right there!” I listened to the sounds of Travis setting the dishwasher, then he came in. “What’s up?” He took the dish towel from his shoulder and playfully whipped it at Janet’s knee.
“Travis,” Lisa said. “Would you kneel for me?”
Maybe ‘Lisa said’ doesn’t accurately describe what happened. It was her mouth moving, but it wasn’t her voice. It wasn’t a woman’s voice at all. Instead, the words of a child. Not an imitation of a child, either. It was the voice of a child coming out of Janet’s mouth, as if badly dubbed in post.
Upon hearing the voice, Travis blinked. He dropped the towel. Then he knelt, watching Lisa with the glassy look usually given to celebrities and cult leaders.
“Travis, would you roll over for me?” Lisa continued in that unthinkable voice.
He obeyed.
“Travis, would you lick my shoe?” Lisa raised her foot.
He took her foot and slowly, deeply, licked the sole from heel to toe.
“Thank you, Travis,” Lisa said. “What do you say?”
“Thank you,” he replied, still lying on his back.
“You can stand up now,” Lisa said.
Travis did so, and as he rose the spell broke. “What did you ladies want? Hang on,” he smacked his lips. “One sec.”
He stepped into the kitchen and we watched him pour a glass of water. “Be right back,” he called, before washing down the taste on his tongue. I imagined it in my own mouth and my stomach turned.
“What was that?” I asked.
“That’s what we call The Voice of Command,” said Janet.
The ladies explained the method. Lisa figured out which part of the brain to stimulate. Janet learned the specific voice register that touched it. Sophia developed a vocabulary to reinforce the command. They could have won the Nobel for it, they told me, if they could have trusted the world with that information.
“Thing is,” said Janet, one day when we were at the dog park with her doodle, “If we could share it with all women, we would. But it would fall into the wrong hands so quickly.”
It worked on most heterosexual men, they explained. It worked best if that man was already attracted to the speaker, obviously, to create a neural bridge that the Voice could then exploit. But they hated that word, exploit. “It’s not that,” Sophia said, once, when I used it. “It’s for mutual benefit. Look at our husbands. Do they seem unhappy?”
She had a point. Shortly after developing the technique, Travis was promoted at Ford and Lisa’s husband stopped binge drinking. Sophia’s husband made amends with his father on his deathbed, something that never would have happened without her intervention. “And it’s more common than you’d imagine. Not our proprietary technology,” Lisa scoffed, “But there are women doing a version of it. I think Michelle Duggar does it. I think it’s something old and lost, that all women used to know. It just had to be rediscovered.”
I’d like to say that I disavowed them over the Voice. I hated it with all my being. The affront to human dignity, the evil of it all — to turn a grown man into a puppet, to reduce him like that — but it was hard to ignore the utility. Ben was struggling. He was overworking himself, not sleeping enough, regardless of the special pillow I bought him or the adaptogenic drink he choked down an hour before bed. I lay in bed with him, a hand gently pressed to his forehead, and thought wouldn’t it be easier if I could just make him sleep? I could learn the secret to the Voice and solve his problem. Wasn’t it cruel not to help?
Then Lucas got sick. He picked up a nasty cold from school (I suspected those rich Grosse Pointers were paying their doctors to falsify vaccination records, because the school teemed with illnesses last seen when a Roosevelt was president) and it soured into bronchitis. Lucas’ lungs were always a little iffy, on account of his being born two months early. So now my house was a sick bay where my chief responsibility was not to care for Lucas. No, my job, as I was often reminded, was to keep Ben from getting sick. Not Daniel, who could have gone on to infect the whole first grade, but Ben. “Just keep him away from me,” he’d say. “I can’t stumble now.”
I should say that Ben’s insomnia had gotten worse. The skin under his eyes was green and pebbled. He snapped at the boys constantly and I ran out of ways to say your father’s very tired.
One night, poor Lucas threw up from coughing too hard. I got him cleaned up and we sat in the kitchen while I made him lemon tea. He looked so much like Ben in that moment, so exhausted and angry with himself in that too-echoing kitchen. I wished we were back in Chicago, with the living room and the kitchen practically the same room.
The front door opened and Ben came in. When he saw Lucas at the table, he didn’t offer a kind word or a paternal thump on the shoulder, but launched into “Why is he wearing my bathrobe?”
“He’s having a rough night. He wanted to wear it.”
“And get me sick? Is that what you want, Melissa? You want to get me sick when you know the quarterly report comes out next week?”
“You barely even wear that bathrobe, Ben.” I watched the kettle sweat on the stove.
“I mean, do you fail to understand the kind of pressure I’m under? If I get sick now, do you know what they’ll do to me?”
“I think you should go to bed. You’re clearly very tired,” I said.
“Why, did you let him sleep there? Maybe lick my pillow?”
“Jesus, Ben, just go to bed!” I said, but out of my mouth came the Voice of Command.
I nearly choked when I heard it. Ben froze.
Over his face came that glassy look I had seen on Lisa, Janet, and Sophia’s husbands’ faces.
He turned and walked to the bedroom.
“I actually slept,” Ben said when he came into the kitchen the next morning. He looked like a different man. “Are the boys up? I need to apologize.”
“I can’t live here, Ben.”
“What?” He finally noticed. “You didn’t go to bed last night, did you?”
“I can’t survive this.”
“What’s this?”
“Grosse Pointe. We need to move.”
We eventually did, six months later. Ben would have resisted it more, but I had almost entirely stopped speaking and he got scared. It wasn’t the silent treatment, you understand, but the fear that I would slip up and use the Voice again. That kind of thing doesn’t happen just once.
It was the relief in that moment, when that child’s voice came out, that most surprised me. Finally, I could stop fighting the Voice and start using it to craft the life we deserved. I could make Ben sleep. I could make him climb the ranks at work more efficiently. I could make him buy me flowers and write Facebook tributes for my birthday. It would be so easy, now that I had full control.
Phoebe Danaher is an award-winning screenwriter based in Los Angeles. They have a BFA in Art and Design, a BA in Art History, and a Master’s in Management from the University of Michigan. Phoebe was the third writer ever to win both the Peter and Barbara Benedek Screenplay and TV Script Awards in the same year. Phoebe’s short stories have been published in several American magazines, including Ergot Press and Expat Press, and in StylusLit in Australia and Eunoia Review in Singapore (upcoming).
